In the May 11 & 25 SN: High-tech cricket farming, AI learns from Minecraft, looking for lithium, a new hominid species is named, signs of life in dead pig brains, Cherokee cave texts decoded, water molecules on the moon and more.

The national park at the southern end of Africa’s Great Rift Valley was once considered a wildlife paradise. Hippopotamuses lolled in the lush waters of Mozambique’s Lake Urema, and thousands of antelope bounded across the park’s savannas and floodplains. Elephant herds and prides of lions drew international tourists.

In the wild, pandas devour massive amounts of bamboo and digest it so efficiently that protein from the plants probably supplies at least half of the animals’ calories, a study finds. That’s about on par with measurements of how many calories from protein make up the carnivorous diets of wolves and feral cats, conservation biologist...

An early winged dinosaur couldn’t fly, but it could run. Now, with assists from a robotic dino and young ostriches wearing artificial wings, a study suggests that the dinosaur’s running gait caused its wings to flap, in what may have been an evolutionary precursor to flight.

Caudipteryx was a peacock-sized dinosaur with feathered and winglike forelimbs that lived about 125 million years...

Trina Chiasson was raised in a log cabin, learned to spin plates in Chicago’s circus arts community, dreamed up a software company and three years later sold it to a bigger company. Her next challenge: building a business, called Ovipost, that brings better technology to cricket farming.

Hippos keep the nutrient silicon on the move through the East African environment.

Each day, the giant grazers transport nearly half a metric ton of silicon, an important nutrient for both plants and animals, from land to water, scientists report online May 1 in Science Advances. The hippos forage for silicon-bearing grass on land and then excrete it into the waters where they lounge....

However badly that home renovation goes, be glad you’re not a young aphid.

Colonies of tiny Nipponaphis monzeni aphids in eastern Asia use their own young as part repair crew, part repair goo. The tiny fluffs of juvenile insects end up dying after gushing white glop from their bodies to repair a hole in the wall protecting their colony in Asian winter hazel trees. New details of this...

Beleaguered populations of green sea turtles living in and around Hawaii and American Pacific island territories are increasing in number.

From 2002 to 2015, scuba diving researchers circumnavigated 53 islands, atolls and coral reefs throughout the U.S. Pacific, conducting the first comprehensive survey in that region of the turtles’ ocean habitats. Over the 13 years, the divers counted...

When it comes to migration science, birds rule. Although many mammals — antelopes, whales, bats — migrate, too, scientists know far less about how those animals do it. But a new device, invented by animal navigation researcher Oliver Lindecke, could open a new way to test how far-ranging bats find their way.

Lindecke, of Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Germany, has...

The extreme dads of the bird world do all the work raising chicks while females fight intruders. The result: Male black coucals don’t sleep around as much when busy parenting.

On occasion, a male black coucal (Centropus grillii) slips over to another male’s nest to sire a chick. The demands of incubating eggs, however, reduce a male’s excursions about 17 percent, on average, compared...